Russian Authorities Say Ukrainian Drone Struck Bus Carrying Belarusian Youth Team; Kyiv Denies Responsibility

Local officials in Russia's border Bryansk region said on Wednesday that a Ukrainian drone struck a bus transporting a children's football team from Belarus, killing a woman who was accompanying the group and wounding seven people, including five children.

Russia's healthcare ministry said all the injured were taken to hospital. Officials did not provide the ages of the children. Photographs carried by a Belarusian television channel showed a grey bus with shrapnel damage along one side and several windows blown out.

"The Armed Forces of Ukraine, using airplane-type drones, attacked the bus of the Gomel (southeast Belarus) children's football team, which was going on holiday to Gelendzhik (on Russia's Black Sea coast)," Bryansk region acting governor Yegor Kovalchuk wrote on social media, according to local reports.

The Belarusian foreign ministry condemned the incident as "another act of terrorism against civilians" and demanded "exhaustive explanations" from Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin urged authorities to take all necessary measures to help the victims, the Kremlin said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the attack as a "barbaric terrorist act," while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he believed the strike was intended to "sow panic" among the population. Russia's Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes, opened a terrorism probe and said the bus was carrying 44 passengers, 28 of them children.

Ukrainian Response and Context

The Ukrainian military denied launching drones over the Bryansk region at the time and called the Russian statements "false." Independent verification of the sequence of events and attribution of responsibility was not available at the time of reporting.

The incident comes amid an increase in cross-border drone strikes attributed to Ukraine and near-daily Russian air raids inside Ukraine since the broader conflict intensified in 2022. On Monday, a large Russian drone and missile barrage killed 11 people across Ukraine and damaged a UNESCO-listed monastery in Kyiv. Fighting along the front remains largely at a standstill and diplomatic talks to end the war are deadlocked.

Also on Wednesday, authorities installed by Moscow in Russian-occupied Luhansk said a man was killed in a Ukrainian strike on a residential building and that a woman was killed while in her car.

Note: Reporting on incidents in active conflict zones may feature conflicting accounts from the parties involved. Independent verification may lag behind initial statements from official sources.